


put down your sword and crown (come lay with me on the ground)

by copperiisulfate



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 03:39:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5812381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperiisulfate/pseuds/copperiisulfate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He watches the dance of Izumo’s small flame, gliding from finger to finger, and realizes that he is, inadvertently, responsible for this too. And this, perhaps, he can forgive himself for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	put down your sword and crown (come lay with me on the ground)

**Author's Note:**

> set somewhere abstractly in the era of rairaku rei’s 'kingdom' short story.

 

They stand by the kitchen counter, shoulder to shoulder, mismatched mugs of matching coffee, black and black, their third this morning. 

Sometimes, he’ll put cream in his but today isn’t one of those days. It’s a special order of Hawaiian Kauai, the highest grade, hand-delivered privately by his own contact. 

(He’d smacked Totsuka’s wrist for wanting to add sugar to it earlier. "You’ll ruin the natural aroma, the flavour!"

Might have felt bad about it too afterwards if Totsuka hadn’t made over-dramatic gagging sounds with every sip thereafter, crying out, “Kusangi-san, is this what death tastes like!?”

Mikoto had shrugged a shoulder and sipped at his in silence, said, "All tastes about the same.”

And Izumo had sighed at his lost causes. “Completely uncultured, both of you.”

It was from his celebratory stash. There was alcohol in store too but it was Sunday morning and he had to set limits _somewhere_.

At any rate, they’d survived the first month of Mikoto’s kingship. Surely, that deserved a toast of sorts.

“And so,” he’d said.

“So,” Mikoto had echoed.

“Long live the king,” Totsuka had said.

And the king had sighed.)

It had been a quiet morning by their standards. He’d spent most of it surveying the remaining work to be done in the old bar after Totsuka had taken off for his third odd job this month. Renovations were underway but more or less at a snail’s pace but Mikoto’s room had been nearly set-up. Mikoto had helped with that bit, done some heavy lifting, but painstaking disassembly and reassembly were beyond his patience. Izumo and Totsuka could also only do so much at a time.

Somehow, it had felt wrong to ask anyone else, to let anyone else in until it was complete (or maybe even then). 

But here, there’s a _clink_ of the mug on the counter-top and, already, he can feel Mikoto’s restlessness bristling beside him.

It’s chased quickly with his own instinctive wave of _something_ – panic? exhaustion? – that he was still learning how to keep at bay.

“Gonna go out for some air,” he says walking over to the sink, rinses out his mug. “Need anything from the corner store?”

“Nah, I'm good,” Izumo says, careful to make his voice the opposite of careful. He knows the set of those shoulders, the line of that jaw, turns his back to it because it’s too early in the day to deal with this.

 _We got through a month,_ he wants to say, out loud, to him, to himself.

It should feel like a victory. 

He’s trying so hard to make it feel like a victory.

 

*  

 

The evening is spent in Mikoto’s neglected apartment. They’ve nearly emptied it now besides a few things in the room, a roll-out futon and a low table. 

Izumo spends most of it sitting on the floor by the futon where Mikoto lays half-awake, half-reading something he seems completely disinterested in. 

He’d spent most of his own time doing paperwork for the bar but now, with the sky darkening completely and the lamplight not being enough, he feels his eyes growing tired, the numbers blurring after a while and so he’d put the books away. He resorts instead to toying with the Zippo in his pocket. From time to time, he’d use it to gauge his own handle on this power, new and still blossoming, still working its way through his bloodstream the same way he’d been working his way through its heat. 

He’d flickered a small flame from finger to finger to thumb and back to his index finger – realized that he was getting better, they all were, what with fewer scorch marks on the walls of the lower level of the bar. He figures he might give it another week or so before he finally kick-started the paint job.

The shadows dance across the room, across Mikoto’s face – and he realizes Mikoto’s put the book away, before he finally lets the flame settle in the center of his palm. 

There’s a moment where their eyes meet over it.

 

*

 

Truthfully, Mikoto doesn’t have strong feelings about the whole change of living quarters thing either way. Even before the bar, he hardly had much use for it beyond sleeping and lazing about every now and then. He also knows Izumo well enough to know that now, with the power, with all the change that followed and surely would continue to follow, Izumo likely feels it would be easier to have everything under one roof, within his own line of vision. It’s not even up for debate that he’s probably right.

Mikoto still finds it a little incredulous that he’d still asked if, instead of the second story of the bar, Mikoto had wanted to move in with him.

And Mikoto had eyed him for a long time, and thought, _No, there was no way._

He couldn’t let himself do that, couldn’t take away and take over possibly the one place of respite Izumo had left in his life from him.  
  
No, he doesn’t have many qualms about leaving this place, about moving into a a place that had been abandoned for years but one that Izumo had set his sights and heart on to raise, ground-up from the earth, and pour a kingdom into. He made it look and sound no more difficult than another one of his sleight of hand tricks. 

(He doesn’t pause to think of it too much - doesn’t find a point in doing so – but every now and then it’s a thought that perhaps, that was how they had managed to operate as seamlessly as they had, believing in each other’s magic, against all rational probability. And he had believed and would go on believing that if anyone could do it, Izumo could.)

It’s also only now that he realizes that his own place, as untouched from disuse as it was, barely beyond a perfunctory residence after they’d finished school and he’d been in and out of odd jobs of his own while Izumo was at the local university, had held some nostalgia after all. 

He’d managed to spend most his days sleeping or smoking or just existing alongside Izumo who would let himself in and either make or bring a meal. Izumo would read out loud bits of his course texts and do his thing in this shared space because this was how it had been for as long as he’d cared to remember and why bother fixing what wasn’t broken to begin with?

Except – back then there hadn’t been this curve-ball thrown right in Mikoto’s face. It wasn’t until a month ago that he’d become something of a pathetic marionette of a stone sword in the sky and told to _deal_. 

Even now, half the time, his skin feels on edge, unnaturally warm, unnaturally cold, like it doesn’t fit quite right, worse than it didn’t fit before.

He watches the dance of Izumo’s small flame, gliding from finger to finger, and realizes that he is, inadvertently, responsible for this too. And this, perhaps, he can forgive himself for, even if only because he’s selfish, and can’t quite look away from the way it illuminates the lines of his face, the curve of his neck. 

His own heart feels like it’s synced in time with the flicker-beat of the flame, and then abruptly halts for a moment when Izumo blows it out, like a candle, before he moves, slow, to slide into the futon and in the space beside him. They lay face to face, as they’ve done a hundred, thousand times before, and yet, it feels different, like the end of an era, precarious and disappearing.

“Stop thinking so hard,” Izumo says. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

Mikoto humours him. “Way too much work and unlike me.”

“I call bullshit.”

And Mikoto finds himself grinning, in spite of himself. “It’s why I keep you around.”

“Right,” he says. “You’d go hungry without me.”

“That too. Anyway, you’re the one who thinks too much. Also why I keep you around.”

“Change is weird, huh?” Izumo says, and maybe he’s voicing it for himself. 

“Nothing’s changed,” Mikoto insists, like a foolish man trying to stop a tide with his bare hands.

“Hasn’t it? Haven’t you?” _Haven’t we?_

 _No,_ thinks Mikoto. _Not us._

“It’s okay to be scared,” he says, and his voice is so soft that Mikoto can’t scoff or brush it off, can’t correct him or deny it or do much more than swallow hard.

And there’s his palm, curved against Mikoto’s jaw, his fingers and thumb fanning over Mikoto’s face and neck, the same hand where a flame sat some moments ago. 

 _I’ve got you,_  he says without saying in that way that he does. 

Eventually, maybe, Mikoto will figure out how to say:  _It’s not me that I’m worried about._

For now, he turns his head, leans into the touch. 

They made it through a month, he thinks.

It feels like something of a victory after all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> written for mikoto/izumo week day one: kingdom. title from passion pit’s moth’s wings.


End file.
